One Question About Money Predicts How Fast an Infant’s Brain Matures

A single query—Can your income meet your family’s basic needs?—appears to capture something profound about infant brain development. Researchers measuring electrical brain activity in babies during their first year of life found that caregivers who answered “never” or “rarely” to that question had infants whose brains showed slower maturation patterns, even when other risk factors were accounted for. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, followed 293...